Practicing clinicians have traditionally played a central role in research, advancing breakthrough treatments for innumerable diseases, from smallpox and cholera to heart disease and cancer. While their insights remain important as ever, recent years have seen the role of the physician-scientist become greatly diminished. Explaining the reasons for this shift as well as potential solutions is a new book called ‘The Vanishing Physician-Scientist?’ (Cornell University Press) by Dr. Andrew I. Schafer, the E. Hugh Luckey Distinguished Professor and chairman of the Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and physician-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. ‘In the last 30 years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of non-physicians Ph.D.s conducting medical research that starts in a laboratory, while the number of physicians in academic medical centers conducting research has declined,’ says Dr. Schafer. ‘This is a major shift from the previous era when physicians often initiated research based on patient observations and led the research effort from clinical studies to laboratory work.’ He attributes the change to a variety of factors, principally explosive advances in basic biomedical sciences such as genomic and molecular medicine, whose pace has outstripped clinical observation and has […]